You have to get to integrity in another way. If you are hiring a management candidate, you want to ask the question in this way: “Tell me about some recent times you had to make a difficult decision, one that affected your personal integrity. What were the circumstances and what happened?”

Now, you hush. You keep your mouth shut and your ears open. Listen for whether it was about product shipment, employee relations, or financial issues—or all three. If a manager candidate—especially a senior candidate—says he or she did not have these decisions, this candidate has not been a manager. Or, is living on another planet. Or has no integrity. Or you didn’t ask the question properly. It’s difficult for me to believe that a manager has not encountered a problem where he or she has not made a difficult decision about something that has brought his or her personal morals or integrity up against the company’s stated needs.

Previous/Next Posts

1 Comment

Tom Parmenter
on January 7, 2013 at 2:16 pm

Interesting to speculate about how Enron interviewed to build a staff of crooks.

My most ethically twisted moment was shepherding a green-card employee through the maze of continuing to work. The idea was demonstrating that there were no American citizens capable of doing the job. The process included posting ads in places where we thought there wouldn’t be any applicants, Computerworld for OS programers, for example. Then we had to interview applicants, looking for any reason to disqualify them. Sadly, most of them didn’t read the ad and turned out to be other green-card people, not American citizens, but I had to talk to them personally.

I did it because I wanted to keep the guy and the company had a whole office full of experts on how to do this, but it still bothers me. It worked, but after I left the company had to park him in Canada for a couple of years to continue his employment. His unique qualification, btw, was knowledge of a programming language that had been used on one module of the product, one that hardly ever needed any work.

Subscribe to the Pragmatic Manager

Johanna’s Books

See Manage Your Job Search on Amazon, too.
See Hiring Geeks That Fit on Amazon, too.
Buy Now
See Manage Your Project Portfolio on Amazon, too.
Buy Now
See Manage It! on Amazon, too.
Buy Now
See Behind Closed Doors on Amazon, too.